Coming up, weather. But first, some doofus.

KCRA, our local NBC affiliate, had a pretty well researched and thoughtful report on the history of (mainly) GOP complaints about the press hating on (mainly) Republicans. Too bad they ruined it by interviewing some random goofball live at the end.

SPOILERS below the fold.

So, I haven’t done live interviews a lot (though I did do an hour live once and an unedited hour, both on C-SPAN) but each time I do I have renewed, if grudging, respect for politicians. It’s hard! You don’t know what they’re going to ask you or how long they’re going to give you. Plus there’s the whole unfamiliarity of glaring lights and wires on your person. So it’s a miracle that people don’t look like even bigger idiots than they do.

And because I dislike looking like an idiot, I generally don’t do these things. But this time my delightful colleagues, including Ari, talked me into it. Because they like seeing me look like an idiot.

On one of the substantive questions, that of quantitative studies, I thought it was pretty impressive they’d looked this up and found the results. If we’d gone into greater depth, the subject of Groseclose and Milyo’s paper might have come up, in which case we could have talked about the merits of Liberman’s criticalanalysis of it. But you’re not likely to hear a sentence like that on your local news.

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ya done good. quarrels with the “slight,” but the important part is that the “liberal media” is a huge and longstanding myth.

the only time i’ve been caught on camera was when my elementary school band did a ken’l ration commercial, circa 1968. we got 2 days out of class and a catering truck, but the commercial never aired because of our principal’s hard-line stance against dubbing in professional music. i still think she was correct; and, at the time, she was probably also right.

Pretty good job, in general. But listen to the audio without looking at the video; you aren’t modulating (compare your answers to the questions) and you aren’t speaking fast enough. On TV, it really doesn’t matter what you say as long as you package it like the doofus in Anchorman… Although your style would work well for PBS, I suppose.

We just had that discussion, Josh. It was a really good segment (all of of you drama coaches’ critiques notwithstanding). Apparently, the anchor is a local institution, able to get away with doing things like delivering actual news, stories girded by actual research.

“Edie, when you talk about ‘what scientists have actually quantified’ it makes you sound like an elitist liberal.”

This was along the lines of what I thought while watching it. I think you did a fine job (particularly given the choice to do the standing up thing, which would have turned me into a crazy fidgetbeast), but I thought that the structure of the interview was problematic. If I were inclined to believe that the media has a known liberal bias, I would probably see the interview as the liberal media bringing in a liberal academic hired gun to help them say a liberal “Nuh-uh!” Even when very skillful interviewers have someone on to help them explain/confirm what they see as misperceptions of their profession, as Bob Garfield or Brooke Gladstone sometimes do on “On the Media,” it still comes off as self-serving. I’m not sure what the solution to this would be though, as the standard approach, having some other schlub on to respond, “Eric, everyone knows that the media has a liberal bias. I can’t believe that you would be so irresponsible as to suggest otherwise,” seems worse than useless.

Eric: would you mind saying a little bit about why the conservative bias of the media was described as “slight”? From my position – living in a nation of actually-liberal-biased media, that seems an understatement.

Eric: would you mind saying a little bit about why the conservative bias of the media was described as “slight”?

Martin—
I think the study most people know and cite is this one, which says that on social issues, the press seems to lean left, while on economic issues, it seems to lean right, and that journalists tend to see themselves as basically centrist.

All these studies raise the question of where the center is, and how you define it; although Americans identify as pretty conservative on average, when you go to them on the issues, they say liberal to left things. So are Americans where they think they are by the labels, or where they are by the issues? Evidence is they vote more where they think they are by the labels, I think.

Eric, you did a good job. (Plus now I know how to say your name! Like Steve Rei(s)ch.) And though the directors seemed content with a typical inconclusive conclusion, you got solid points across. (Striking how fixed phrases like “working the refs” help in this.)

I can’t recall, but was it pointed out/emphasized that the continued chants of “liberal media” in the media are in fact an expression of conservative bias? The working-the-refs/talk-radio bits point there but aren’t explicitly on that point.

Have there been historical quantitative studies of media bias? I wonder if there was a bias in major national media like the New York Times in the 1960s towards liberal positions on civil rights.

Actually, the whole media bias thing goes back a long, long way – way before the 1960s. And there are so many problems with studying it (for instance: what is your sample? CBS News? New York Times? what exactly is the audience compared to, say, the Gannett chain?). David Greenberg gave a paper at a conference called “The Conservative Origins of the Liberal Media,” that, I think, goes into some of the issues in much detail. Historically, the right said the broadcast networks work in the pocket of Roosevelt, and, for the most part, they were correct (CBS fired a highly-rated anti-Roosevelt commentator at the administration’s insistence… imagine Rush Limbaugh being forced off the air by Bill Clinton – link here)
FWIW, beyond the obvious sampling issues (there is no such thing as “the media” today), there are other definitional issues. Here is Walter Cronkite on that question:

You have basically come out and said you’re a liberal. How do you respond when critics say, “Aha, I knew reporters were liberal, and this is why the media is biased”?
I do not consider a liberal necessarily to be a leftist. A liberal to me is one who—and it suits some of the dictionary definitions—is unbeholden to any specific belief or party or group or person, but makes up his or her mind on the basis of the facts and the presentation of those facts at the time. That defines what I am. I have never voted a party line. I vote on the individual and the issues.

So the question is actually incredibly difficult to answer in real time and even more difficult to read into the past. For instance, aside from the obvious overlap of liberal personnel (George Stephanopolous, Robert Kintner – how many people here know the President of NBC left the network to join the Johnson White House in 1966 to sell the Vietnam War to the American people? – Bill Moyers, the editor of the NYTimes‘s Op Ed page today – David Shipley- is a former Clinton speechwriter) there are so many other variables, including professionalism, etc…. And on Civil Rights, the coverage on the networks was surprisingly “even-handed” – which, is essentially, pro-status quo. George Wallace was given plenty of time to race-bait. It was the pictures, not the words, that conveyed the larger message. Joshua Meyrowitz and the classic George W.S. Trow “In The Context of No Context” deal with some of this.

As early as 1935, Yale Psychologist Leonard Doob wrote that the American media can never be progressive, liberal, or educational because advertising requires exploitation of existing bias – advertising is inherently conservative. And he was right, too.

My apologies for the length/mess – I’m running off to class and this is one of my scholarly interests.

Sociology Classics:
Herbert Gans, Deciding What’s News (Columbia U Sociologists finds journalists have a “para-ideology” that’s vaguely reformist and progressive in some ways, less so in others).
Edward Jay Epstein, News From Nowhere (finds that reporters fool themselves about who they are and what they do)
Gay Tuchman Deciding What’s News somewhat like Gans, finds the vaguely-reformist/progressive/anti-authority proclivities of typical journalist are tightly constricted by their employers, so the personal bias sometimes makes it through but is often censored by corporate concerns (including internal censorship). So reporters might be liberal, but their journalism isn’t.
(I’ll also throw in Daniel Hallin’s work – including We Keep America on Top of the World, here, talking about the politics of the media in terms of spheres of consensus. Its not “right” or “left” but rather the public space of debate the media follows. The media privileges power, plain and simple. When there is consensus – i.e.: going to war with Iraq – then the media paradigm is simple; when there is debate – i.e.: Fulbright hearings on Vietnam – than the media has political space. In this sense, the media – TV News, really – is strictly a tool of political authority)

Popular, but less scholarly:
Eric Alterman, What Liberal Media?: Remember: he actually does say they are liberal on some select social issues, while conservative on everything else. Should always be paired with:
William McGowan, Coloring the News: not just because of Alterman’s hit-job on this book but also because these two are exemplars of the genre from right and left. Both well-researched, persuasively-argued and good reads.

I wont even begin to get into Chomsky, but I would advise anybody who believes Chomsky to challenge themselves with a healthy dose of Michael Schudson, especially the introduction to The Power of News. If you want to go the propaganda theory of news, go with the classics before Chomsky – like Jacques Ellul, and even reach way back to Leonard Doob’s 1935 Propaganda or the social psychological work like Allport and Cantril’s The Psychology of Radio (both of which make the point firmly that American broadcasting – but not necessarily press – will always be reactionary because of psychology of advertising).

And, of course, McLuhan, Guy DeBord and others (including Joshua Meyrowitz, in No Sense of Place) would tell you the question of media being “right” or “left” is completely misguided. Its not the message, its the medium. Radio is hot, irrational and emotional, TV is cool, engaging and participatory. Neither, per se, favors a political perspective. Some – like Jeffrey Scheuer try to argue that the structure of the media system translates into a conservative bias in results, if not intent. But he’s saying nothing that wasn’t said by Doob in 1935, or Upton Sinclair in The Brass Check (1919).

By the way, the debate is ridiculous but its nice to have. Its a sign of health in a democracy when everybody is a media critic (I think that was Schudson’s line). But, I guess, by this standard, some might argue that the old Soviet Union was more “democratic” – because nobody trusted TASS – than the contemporary USA where too many people trust the NYTimes.

Yes, thanks for the reading list. I’ve been trying to expand my historical knowledge of the media so I definitely appreciate it.*

Yeah—the guy in the video mentioned McKinley.

This is a good example of why newspeople should get comments from historians more often.

*I’d ask what you think of the Donald Ritchie books on the Washington press corps, but it’s been noted before that questions asked on old threads usually go unanswered. I meant to come back to this thread earlier, but it slipped my mind.